NETWORKWORLD:
Cloud computing debate centers on pros/cons of computing's latest trend for higher-ed, others
By John Fontana , Network World , 11/05/2009
DENVER -- Is cloud computing inevitable? Maybe, but IT still has a lot of questions to ask before floating away on its promises, according to Melissa Woo, director of cyberinfrastructure and network and operations services at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Michael Dieckmann, CIO at the University of West Florida, thinks otherwise and the two spent Wednesday at the annual Educause conference debating the hype vs. the hope around commercial cloud computing that promises to cut IT costs and provide efficiencies.
Woo's contention isn't so much that the cloud won't emerge as an option, but that IT still has a lot of questions to ask before floating away on its promises.
"Why is the conversation always when, why are we not asking why," she said to a packed Educause session that with a raising of hands showed the audience of higher-ed IT pros are on the fence over cloud computing. "Gartner has cloud computing at the peak of inflated expectations on its hype cycle," she said. Woo noted recent reports of outages by large providers should grab attention. This week, cloud provider Rackspace reported its third outage since June. Last month, Microsoft reported it lost the data stored by users of T-Mobile's Sidekick service before eventually recovering most of the data. And Google, which provides e-mail services for students, faculty and staff on Dieckmann's campus, has had numerous outages that have frustrated users so much that Google developed a Google Apps Status Dashboard and pumps updates to users via RSS. [Read more]
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